Reviews
September 25, 2012
The ‘You’ In Yunior: Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her 3
by Michael Bourne
Yunior is not a bad guy, but he is growing up, and as Diaz is honest enough to admit in this collection, getting older isn’t necessarily all mellowing out and seeing the error in your youthful ways.
September 17, 2012
The Girls’ Guide to War: Shani Boianjiu’s The People of Forever Are Not Afraid 0
by Yevgeniya Traps
If you are finding it just a little difficult to picture a Venn diagram where a novel-in-stories about the Vietnam War intersects with a Tina-Fey penned movie about the travails of high school girls, consider this: both war and high school are marked by a strange blend of ennui and nearly unbearable stress, of existential dread and petty banality.
September 13, 2012
Defiance unto Death: On Mortality by Christopher Hitchens 3
by Morten Høi Jensen
Martin Amis recalls that when he was in Cyprus to be best man at Hitchens’s first wedding in 1980, he would spend his mornings decamped by the pool, whereas Hitchens would often show up in a suit and announce his immediate intention of going to the bar to find someone to argue with.
September 13, 2012
At Sea in the Deserts of Letdown: On Davy Rothbart’s My Heart is an Idiot 2
by Jessica Freeman-Slade
But the laziness with which Rothbart’s hookups and hangouts are depicted, highlighting major moments of failure without meditating on their significance, indicates a troubling trend in young memoirs. It takes more than experience to make a narrative voice, and not every failure or triumph should be destined for memoirization.
September 12, 2012
Golden Oldie: Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue 8
by Michael Bourne
Until the final pages, when the meshugas that is the plot of Chabon’s novel finally falls of its own weight, Telegraph Avenue is a sparkling, mesmerizing read.
September 6, 2012
Eating Dirt: On Charlotte Gill and the Life of the Treeplanter 1
by Emily St. John Mandel
Gill’s stories are fascinating, but she is possessed of that rarest of attributes among memoirists: an understanding of her own story as only a part of a broader picture, a willingness to broaden the focus beyond the particulars of her personal experience.